Falling Into Pale
by Jenwryn
Summary: Remus/Sirius. For a friend. AU set in January 1982. Sirius wasn't caught and thrown in Azkaban; now he's sent Remus a letter. My first R S and it's really only slash if you want to read that into it, I suppose. And the fog is the third character... R&R.


_Disclaimer:__ All publicly recognisable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. Original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended. Not beta-read; don't jinx, although corrective spells are more than welcome to be cast in my direction._

_A/N: My first attempt at this ship, but I would like to point out that it's only slash if you wish to read it as such. Simply because I know how much it squicks some people. For the record._ _Also, and__ this is me about to pick holes in my own story: firstly, Remus couldn't have read "A ciascuno il suo" (a book mentioned), because it wasn't published until 1988, and this piece is set in '82, but hey, it's fan fic, not a thesis. Secondly, the smoking thing... do I need to excuse that? I have no idea where it came from. I don't smoke, don't even want to (ahhh, U2 lyrics...!), but this is the eighties and hey, it just happened: but it's a nasty habit, so don't take it up. -has now finished preaching-_

_Dedication: For Atlas aka Vyadh, who knows who she is and that's all that matters._

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**Falling Into Pale**

[January 1982

The fog. It's dense and white, and the moment he steps through the doorway and out onto the street it gathers him up in its cold, clammy embrace; swallows him whole. Remus read a passage about fog once, in one of his mother's books, and it rises vaguely in his mind as he tugs his scarf higher around his neck and turns the collar of his coat up. T.S. Eliot, or Evelyn Waugh perhaps, fog as a metaphor for incomprehensibility or was it greed, and something about flags... he can't remember, but he retains the distinct impression that it was yellowed like sepia, or maybe grey. This fog that sucks in against his skin is eggshell white as he pushes through it, his footsteps quick but cautious across wet cobblestone. White and blinding, and consuming the world as it's already consumed him, gnawing away at buildings and closed-up shop fronts. Amongst it, street lamps hang like dim amber globes, bleary fire-lit full moons, suspended in nothingness above him where the night sky should be, all obscured and blurred at the edges.

There are no straight lines left. No definition. Life has lost its boundaries.

Remus finds his way almost on instinct alone. The corners of houses and the curves of roads are invisible as he hurries along, hands buried deep in the pockets of his old coat. His right hand shares its space with his wand. He touches it, but he doesn't clasp it, grip it, cling to it like he wants to, because that would be to confess the almighty terror and suffocation rising inside of him. Still, the flesh and the wood like as close as brothers, as close as - his chest tightens. The though of where his feet are taking him demands attention in his mind, but he tries to ignore it, close it out. He doesn't want to think about what he's doing. Doesn't want to think about the letter - crumpled - smoothed out - damaged - caressed - that he carries in his other pocket. Doesn't want to think about the claims it makes, claims that fly in the face of all the evidence that paints its writer guilty. Its writer, whom he goes to meet. To meet, and Remus doesn't want to think about what he'll do when he gets there, if he looks into those grey eyes that never could lie to him, and reads his worst fears.

But nor does he want to think about the last two and a half months and what it's been like to swim in a sea of uncertainty.

His shoulders hunch down as he passes unseen alleyways that he knows gape like open mouths beside him. His imagination, forbidden as it is from conjuring up the face of the one who waits, taunts him instead with images of what might lurk beyond. Death Eaters, devoured by futile fury at their leader's destruction. Aurors come to hunt, to hunt. He doesn't know which is worse and the anxiety that has been stroking his heart with its small jagged nails gives a lurch and blooms into full-bodied fear, the fear he's been trying to deny. He tells himself to stop being stupid, to act his age, to be a man, but the thought does nothing more than cause a bitter laugh to break out from between his teeth and in the fog it sounds like a dull, half-dead cry. Be a man. A man is the one thing he'll never be. And all around him, a city of men sprawls vast, vast beyond the few measly feet he can decipher smudged and faded at the edges of his vision, vast and sprawling, and he walks amongst it, the not-man, shaking in the face of the unknown and worse, the part-known.

He doesn't want to think about the night the world shredded, the night they died, and Sirius—

Remus pulls his coat rough around him and thinks instead of the common little evils that scuttle in the blankness. He understands the banal evils because he is one himself; he understands the burden bearers because he bears one himself. Just because you can't see the paw-prints of vermin in the cheese, doesn't mean that the vermin can't see them, and I am vermin on the same cheese and I can see the tracks of the others... He'd read that in a book too. Something foreign. Italian. Muggle. Unpronounceable name. Leonardo Sciascia.

He thinks about books in an attempt to shut up his mind with its games of cloak-and-dagger, but it doesn't help. Especially since people died in that book. Died and vanished. Vanished out of time and space and were left to freeze, dead, in abandoned quarries, vanished, as he himself has vanished into the fog as it sways around him like the world's last iced breath. Vanished...

Sometimes he catches a movement out of the corner of an eye as he strains to see ahead, but he tells himself it could be anything: the funeral waltz of the cold wind wandering through the whiteness; the puff of heating's steam from a pipe jutting out at angles above a window; some other damned soul passing without pause in an effort to just get home.

Home. Remus has no home anymore. Home was never a place, home was people, people, and only one of them left and what if—? What if, when he arrives at the meeting place, it's empty? What if, when he arrives, it's not? What if he reads in those eyes that the accusations are true and he has to— His hands close into fists in his pockets and jerk his brain into silence. _Idiot. Stop thinking. You think too much. You always have. _He forces himself to breathe. The air from his lungs rises against his face like the fog's brother. It's as though it's invaded him, the fog, entered his insides, his entrails; leaves and exits in a flurry of breath that's surely only warm because the world beyond is so cold. The bare skin of his face stings as the paleness nibbles with tiny blunted teeth.

Remus follows the orbed street lamps as they curve a trail up the hill, small suns cold and dying slowly, stranded here in the world of men. An empty beer bottle catches at his feet and rolls off down the street behind him with a hollow rattle; he half turns to follow the sound. It alters strangely, then he realises that it's not the bottle he can hear now. A motorbike rumbles, coming the wrong way up the one-way street towards him, a one-eyed creature that slips and skids on the slick cobblestones as it frames him in it's sudden fog-lit glare. For a second his heart stops dead, but then the bike rights itself and swerves around him and is gone, indifferent to the heat of mad, crazy hope that had blazed on his face, roaring off into the nothingness with loud defiance to mask the rider's embarrassment at have been seen to almost fall.

For a moment he'd thought—

The silence slides back in around him, and the pain. Suffocating, suffocating, the world's been consumed and left him alone in the fog. Suddenly he doesn't dare stop walking because the irrational thought has seized him that if he does, the stones before him and the stones behind him will melt away into the all-consuming nothing and he'll tumble into the pale.

All he can hear are his muted, hurried steps and his heavy, hurried breathing.

What if he looks into those eyes and sees—?

Remus reaches the crest of the hill and there it is: nothing more than a tiny point of red. Just a small bright light, indistinct at first and yet he knows, and as he nears it becomes a circle; the glowing end of a roll-your-own. In the dispersed gleam of a street lamp he can make out the bluish smoke invading the whiteness and, beneath it, behind it, the shape of it's creator takes form, gains substance as he nears. Oh familiar shape, leaning there against the wall, just like the letter had said, leaning there, just like the letter had promised. Leaning there, almost casually, almost devil-may-care, until the sound of Remus's footsteps makes him raise his head. They're close now, already. The weird lamplight does strange things as the fog swirls fitfully between them. Somehow Remus's wand is in his hand, held in his trembling fingers, held at the end of a trembling arm, but he already knows that he won't need it, already knows and it takes only instinct to keep a grasp of it at all as he sinks himself in those grey eyes that have haunted him two and a half miserable months, and drinks what they tell him to the full.

Sirius steps away form the wall and drops his cigarette, disappearing it beneath his boot. He looks worn, he looks haggard, he looks—

"Hey," he says like a greeting, and the warmth of that word, and the pleading of it, and the aching of it, cuts through the fog even as Remus reaches him and pulls him close. Somehow, somehow, it's going to be alright.


End file.
